Traveling Bangkok with only 30$ (Part 2)

Decisions, Decisions

Bed Supperclub @ Trover

By the time you come back from the klong tour, it will be around 4 to 5 pm. At this point, you’ll probably be pretty hot and tired. From Saphan Taksin you’ve got several options. You can get back on the river taxi to Pa Athit and return to your guesthouse to take a shower and relax for a bit; if you can’t face the river anymore you can jump in a taxi and brave the Bangkok traffic in air-conditioned luxury. If you are still up for seeing more of Bangkok, you can head away from the river and head into the centre of the city on the Skytrain. If you want to head to nightclubs like Bed Supperclub, best put on your best clothes and get some extra cash.

Dinner

If you head back to your guesthouse, there are scores of places around Pa Athit and Khao San Road where you can find cheap eats for dinner. Rambutree road has some very good places – Khao San tends to be busy and overpriced. Pa Athit itself has some excellent restaurants where Thai students and intelligentsia hang out, but they’re not especially cheap.

You can have a hearty dinner on Rambutree for around 150 Baht. After dinner, you can stroll on Khao San doing some window shopping or just nurse a beer and people watch – Khao San is definitely a great place for that. Indeed, you could grab some Pad Thai and spring rolls for 30 Baht for dinner and spend the rest on booze – or save some for post beer munchies later. I don’t recommend doing this every night though…

I overshot a little bit, but you can see that it’s quite feasible to have a full on day in Bangkok for around $30 / $40, including accommodation and food, without feeling like you are purposely economising. You could skip the klong tour and take your pick from the huge bunch of things you can do in Bangkok for free if you were really strapped for cash. Similarly, I am personally very fond of my food, so you could probably shave a few baht off each meal expense, but it’s important to remember to eat well and healthily when travelling.

Instead of the Grand Palace, Wat Po and the Klong Tour, there are plenty of other places in Bangkok, like Jim Thompson’s house, which you can go and see instead that cost around the same sort of money or less. Therefore if you spent several days in Bangkok, a budget of $30 a day would be fairly consistent over each day.

I think the hidden costs of travelling are actually partying and shopping. Booze in Thailand is cheap – it’s a couple of dollars for a bottle of beer – but drink 2 or 3 beers a night and it quickly adds up. Cigarettes are also cheap – but a pack is another couple of dollars a day. Similarly with shopping – Bangkok is a shopper’s paradise that’s awash with fake designer goods and tshirts etc. Once you start snapping up bargains it starts to chew up money quite quickly too.

Remember too that Bangkok is not necessarily representative of all of Thailand. Accommodation in Bangkok is cheap because there is so much of it – on places like Koh Phi Phi and other Thai Islands, accommodation can get expensive and the cheap options where they exist are often squalid. That said, if you find a decent beach hut for 300 baht a night and do little else but soak up the sun and drink a few beers for a few days, a week in Thailand is going to cost you a lot less than $30 a day.